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    Antarctica

    Emperor penguins

    New Protections for Emperor Penguin Reflect 'Growing Extinction Crisis'

    "The penguin's very existence depends on whether our government takes strong action now to cut climate-heating fossil fuels and prevent irreversible damage to life on Earth," said one advocate.

    Julia Conley
    Oct 25, 2022

    More than a decade after campaigners first warned U.S. officials that the emperor penguin of Antarctica must be federally protected as the species faces threats to its habitat due to the climate crisis, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Tuesday announced that the penguin is being listed as endangered.

    "It finally happened," tweeted the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), which filed a petition in 2011 calling for the emperor penguin to be listed under the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

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    Antarctic Ice Shelf

    The Terrifying Future in Which We Return to a Past Too Warm for Antarctica's Ice Shelves

    There is bad news for the planet when we consider what it means to have atmospheric carbon levels of 421 ppm.

    Juan Cole
    Sep 26, 2022

    So as a historian, I am particularly interested in what the past tells us about the present. I've taught courses on climate change in history. But of course my kind of history doesn't go back very far from the point of view of physical scientists. The academic discipline of "history" is really the history of humanity since the invention of writing. Even for the world history textbook at Cambridge in which I was involved I doubt we cited any document older than 4,000 years. Writing systems emerged in what is now Iraq around 5,200 years ago. Excitingly enough, scientists reconstructing the history of the earth before humans evolved have developed tools to do so that are increasingly precise.

    Given our current predicament, of a rapidly heating globe, we are especially interested in looking at past periods similar to our own. One way to do so is to find proxies for the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

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    Opinion
    Glaciers are seen in Antartica

    Rapidly Retreating Doomsday Glacier Clinging 'By Its Fingernails': Study

    "Just a small kick to Thwaites could lead to a big response," warned the lead author of an alarming new analysis.

    Jake Johnson
    Sep 06, 2022

    New research unveiled Monday suggests that the West Antarctic Thwaites Glacier--an enormous ice mass with the potential to trigger catastrophic sea level rise--could retreat far more quickly in the coming years than scientists previously anticipated as fossil fuel-driven planetary warming continues to accelerate.

    "We should expect to see big changes over small timescales in the future--even from one year to the next."

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